But these apprehensions would come with George and they would not go until George left her again.

The house with its heavy late-Victorian furniture, its velvet carpets which muffled footsteps, its thick curtains which hid doorways, its red walls, its bevelled mirrors, its substantial and costly ornaments, its solid paintings in solid frames--the house and all that it contained diffused for Gabriella an inescapable atmosphere, and this atmosphere was like the one in which she had waited expectantly in her childhood for the roof to be sold over her head.

Now, as then, she waited for something to happen, and this something was a fact of dread, a shape of terror, which must be ignored as long as its impending presence was not directly before one's eyes.

But with the look she was familiar, for she had seen it in her mother's face as far back as she could remember.

It was associated in her mind with the need of money, with scant food, with scant fires, with a brooding and sinister hush in the house.